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man we are in such a bad place if textbooks die out as a way of learning. i am not going to tell you the traditional system of education is the best way for everything, but i think that textbooks have incredible value for learning about grammar for second languages, for example
something like half of all the noob questions you see in online language learning forums are from duolinguo users who are facing the bitter struggle of puzzling out a language's grammar without a textbook, and even for similar languages this is a horrible thing you shouldn't do
and don't even get me started, don't even get me fucking started, on duolingo's terrible approach to japanese teaching
@hikari which is? I can't use duolingo because of accessibility issues they don't care about fixing, but yeah, why is the japanese learning module particularly bad?
@esoteric_programmer duolingo is based on this kind of idea of language immersion where they tell you as little as possible about the language and throw you straight into the text. unfortunately, this only really works for sufficiently similar languages, and you really can't treat japanese as if it's Just Another European Language. but duolingo is not the first or the last language-learning system to make this mistake
@hikari yeah, that's such a noobie mistake to make, like, not even the alphabets they write with are similar to ours, how are you supposed to learn to pronounce it?